London Ninja

I finally got to watch Dark Knight, like 3 years after it came out. I’m not sure how relevant this review is, since I’m assuming most people have watched it. My friend Bitcharse asked me to review it so I will make this exception and come out of my self-imposed no-movie-review rule. I also have a self-imposed rule that when I break that other rule, that I only do UK movies. Let’s see how this goes…it’s been a while since my last review.

IMAX Experience
So I waited so long so I can watch it on the IMAX screen. Unfortunately, we actually missed our initial date because we were in San Diego attending a wedding. They graciously moved us to the Thursday after we came back, which was very nice of them. Unfortunately, we totally missed that also! Our options after that was really to go back with a sob story about my sick aunt and my epileptic bengal cat. The result? 11:30pm showing on Friday night. Bloody hell. Yes, the tube stops running at like 11:30pm. And yes, we didn’t get the ideal seats.

So overall, the experience is likely to be better than watching it in a proper theatre with stadium seating and Sony or THX sound. The problem, of course, is that IMAX theatres are made more for sprawling landscapes. While there were some impressive scenes with a lot of detail, you are too close to the screen to watch Batman flying across the screen and beating up bad guys. I don’t think you really gain that much from watching this movie in an IMAX theatre.

Plot
The movie could have been shorter to conform to Hollywood standards. I personally enjoy 2.5-3 hour movies so it wasn’t a problem for me. There were some sideplots, however, that I felt unnecesary. Like the story with the Asian dude (not that I don’t support more ninjas on the theatre), the story of the accounting guy at Wayne Enterprises. None of these were necesary. Overall, however, I was pretty engaged…even at 1:45am.

Action
No discernable CGI. It felt like all stunts were real old-school stunts. It’s pretty refreshing to see real action after watching the Hulk and Ironman. I do think that they made the BatMobile a bit too powerful.

My biggest gripes
1. Batman should have killed the Joker much sooner.
2. How is it that Batman’s body armour didn’t block Harvey Two Face’s bullet at the end? I thought that’s the whole point?
3. Last but certainly not least…Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Look, I’m not that superficial. And even if I am, I only rate chicks on “JITT“. But man, talk about a downgrade. I’m not saying Katie Holmes was totally hot, but Maggie Gyllenhaal is no Katie Holmes. She’s probably not even Sarah Palin. It was distracting for me. Just Sayin…

Overall Rating
Action, Fugly Maggie (yeah, I came up with that all on my own), dead actor playing Joker, comic book character. There’s nothing not to like here. I give this movie all mah ninjas:

Verdict: 5 / 5 Ninjas.

When I first came to the UK, I was pretty skeptical of RyanAir, the revolutionary low cost leader of flights in the UK. As a matter of fact, I made fairly disparaging remarks about them in a previous blog during a different time. Since then, however, I have taken so many Ryanair flights, I have come to love it like I love cutting my nails…and by cutting my nails, I mean scooping out the toe jam and spreading it on toast. Just saying…

Earlier this year I did a finance programme at LBS where we examined RyanAir as a case study. Wow. 15-20% margins for an airline (even Southwest and Jetblue are in the single digits) A Dumb-arsed CEO that won’t take out leverage for the company. A hard-arsed CEO that had a college intern build the reservation website to be brutal with expenses (the website is fugly). A company known for asking its own staff to bring in stationary. A flying experience full of advertisements and no joke…lottery ticket sales during the flight.

So why do I love it?
1. Yes, it is cheap. And by cheap, I mean dirt cheap. And by dirt cheap, I mean sometimes it’s even free. By free, I mean you still pay a bunch of charges for things outside of the ticket. Here are the prices for my last set of tickets purchased, including one this past Sunday when my mates ODJ and KokoBWare come into town in November.

Here are some of my last trips:
1. London Stansted (STN) to Pisa (Florence) (PSA) – 18.99GBP out of pocket. (1-way)
2. London Stansted (STN) to Hamburg Lübeck (LBC) – 25.80GBP for two people
3. London Stansted (STN) to Carcassonne (CCF) – 4.84 for two people
4. London Stansted (STN) to Tours Loire Valley (TUF) – 4.84 for two people
5. London Stansted (STN) to Belfast (City) (BHD) – 4.84 for two people
6. London Stansted (STN) to Shannon (SNN) – 112gbp for four people

2. It is always on time. Apparently RyanAir staff are judged on their timeliness. By doing this, RyanAir has been able to achieve the title for the most on-time airline in the world.

I understand it’s not perfect…but neither are my nails for that matter. Perfect would be no toejam. I have toejam. Ce La Vie.

I have been blogging less frequently for a few reasons:

1. I’m completely integrated into the British society and therefore things aren’t new and exciting anymore. I drink proper tea a few times a day and actually ask my mates if they’re “all right” now as a way to greet them.

2. The US elections are here and I have to catch up on the debates. I usually do not like to bring up politics in public forums as they tend to offend…and I don’t like to offend…like when I called you a fat-so. Um…so I don’t support either presidential candidate. Here’s the thing: I don’t like old foagies so I don’t like McCain. I also don’t like terrorists, so I don’t like Obama. There’s that. I hope I didn’t offend anybody with those simple sweeping statements. Oh, and btw, McCain dislikes colored people.

3. Madge divorced Guy Ritchie without a prenupt. Yes, this was on the front page of the daily Tube paper, the Metro. Yes, the Metro is the only source of news I read. Yes, £150m.

4. We’re in the middle of a global economic meltdown not seen since the Great Depression with whole countries on the brink of bankruptcy. Maybe that makes Iceland one of my top 5 destinations for 2009…unless the inhabitants resort to cannibalism.

So all of those tough external factors and the fact that I’ve been traveling but not having sorted through all my pictures yet have contributed to a gradual slowing of my blog output. I will try to reverse this trend for the rest of the quarter…unless McCain wins.

I’ll take any excuse to put up an image of Hoff.

Word: Kit
Definition: The standard equipment and attire worn by players in association football. That’s soccer.
Usage: Put on your kit, we’ll be doing press-ups in 15 minutes.

Not Kitt, as in Michael Knight & Kitt. I enrolled in a “lunchtime boot camp” and was subsequently introduced to the word kit. Nice.

I had been waiting for Dark Knight all summer since its announcement and of course, the death of Heath Ledger (RIP). Action. Romance. Love. Chicks. Chicks making out (rumoured). It’s got it all, and I finally get to watch it….October 9th. I can’t wait!!! Literally…I can’t wait.

So given Dark Knight was filmed in 65mm IMAX film for four action-packed sequences, that’s the way you’re supposed to watch it…in an IMAX theatre near you. Unfortunately, London only has 1 IMAX theatre, the SouthBank which sold all seats for like 2 months right away. If you’ve ever been in a IMAX theatre before, you know that if you sit anywhere near the front, you will not see anything but blur, especially in action sequences. Given it costs around 13 quid to watch this film, I figure I have to make sure I’m in the middle, about 4 rows from the back. Those are the prime seats. And, yes, I have to wait over a month to watch it. It better be the best film I’ve ever seen as it will be both the most expensive film I’ve ever seen as well as the longest I’ve ever had to wait for a movie between buying the tickets and actually watching it. Bloody hell.

Public transportation in London are amongst some of the most expensive in the world. If you do not use an Oyster card, you could very well pay like 4 quid a ride for a single pass. I remember when Agenda visited me in London last year where I was certain it was a mistake. How could you be charged 4 quid to go from one end of a town to the other? Well, sure enough…it was correct. Bloody hell. The Oyster card does make things better by about half, but it is still very expensive compared to say New York or San Francisco.

So… when things are too expensive, what do you do? Well, you hack it, of course. Apparently some Dutch security researchers have figured out how to hack Oyster cards and will be publishing it in October. I would assume that there will have been a patch applied to the system by then but once you get a compromise to one of these massively deployed systems, it will probably be pretty quick when hackers get around that patch. It’s like any of your gaming consoles, DirecTV or any other type of protection systems…you can only hold off the hackers for so long before chaos ensues.

Word: chinos
Definition: a usually khaki cotton or synthetic-fiber twill of the type used for military uniforms
Usage: This usage comes straight from one of my emails where I was asking a colleague on whether I can wear jeans at our stand in the conference.

The response was: “No jeans please. Rich and I are going chinos”. Fair enough. Who doesn’t love Chinos?

Cheerio

It just sounds right, doesn’t it? “Bank Holiday” instead of “Memorial Day”, “President’s Day”, or some other lame name. The US needs to just call it as it is…a day when the banks are closed. “Bank Holiday”, suckas.